


Day Seven: Til Death Do Us Part

by Euphorion



Series: Writober [7]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Death in Flashback, Flashbacks, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-21 17:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8254903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: The wind howled around Himuro, scattering the small pile of human teeth he’d carefully arranged to his left. He stopped the thought dead, shoving his eyes closed and breathing in deep, concentrating only on his lungs, on the cold stone beneath him, on the pain of his nails biting into his palms. It was dangerous, letting himself get angry here. He couldn’t afford to be angry. If this was going to work, he needed to be nothing but focused, precise, and unwilling to give an inch.





	

The wind whipped through the crypt. Himuro had propped the door open in his wake to let in the light of the waning moon but this wind wasn’t coming in from outside—it rose from the pit in front of him, a sigh escaping from the throat of the earth.

Himuro pressed shaking hands together. His knees were aching from kneeling on the floor. Tomorrow would be worse than it had been before—without the push of strength from the blood moon he was having to pull so much more from his own reserves of magic, and he knew it would leave him shaking and exhausted, even if he did manage to sleep for a few hours.

He stretched his back, weariness bitter in the back of his throat. If he ever found whoever had stopped his spell on the night of the blood moon, he’d—

The wind howled around him, scattering the small pile of human teeth he’d carefully arranged to his left. He stopped the thought dead, shoving his eyes closed and breathing in deep, concentrating only on his lungs, on the cold stone beneath him, on the pain of his nails biting into his palms. It was dangerous, letting himself get angry here. He couldn’t afford to be angry. If this was going to work, he needed to be nothing but focused, precise, and unwilling to give an inch.

+

_“Stubborn, Muro-chin,” Murasakibara teased, reaching up to cup his jaw. His head was cushioned on Himuro’s knee, Himuro’s hands in his hair._

_Himuro let his eyes slip closed. “Not letting you do something stupid and dangerous isn’t stubborn, it’s smart,” he said, turning his face so Murasakibara could feel his words as well as hear them. “Isn’t that why you keep me around? Because I’m smart?”_

_Murasakibara snorted a laugh, shifting his hand so his fingers were tracing over Himuro’s lips. “Never said you were smart,” he said slowly. Himuro opened his eyes to look down at him. Murasakibara’s eyes were soft. “Keep you around because you’re pretty.”_

_Himuro pressed a tiny kiss to the broad tips of his fingers. “Then you have to deal with me being smart as a side effect,” he said. “Atsushi. Don’t do this.”_

+

He leaned over to gather up the teeth again, piling them back up into a conical pile, and checked that the small brass dish on the other side of him hadn’t spilled. Pushing his hair back from his forehead, he sighed and shifted on his knees, trying again to center himself. Carefully he dipped his left forefinger into the dish. The blood still felt warm—he’d kept it in his refrigerator before coming here, and the night was cold, but he knew better than to resist the impossible. 

Closing his eyes, he drew a line down the center of his forehead, trying not to think about his failure—both of his failures—to perform this summons. He was getting better, he told himself, his movements more precise, the speech more natural on his tongue. He rolled his shoulders, trying not to think about slamming up against that wall on the night of the blood moon. Trying not to think about the way the power slipped from him the first night, splitting in two and twisting from his grasp.

 _Third time’s the charm,_ he thought, and did not laugh.

He continued the line of blood down his nose and over his lips, allowing himself to imagine the hand as not his own, but Atsushi’s. Maybe that would help. He dipped his finger again and continued the pattern down his chest. It was easy, sinking into the fantasy. Atsushi’s warm fingers tracing slow and sure down the center of his chest, circling his solar plexus. He thought about Atsushi’s eyes the way he would look at him, only him, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Atsushi’s hand dragging sideways across his stomach, his thumbnail sliding sharp against his skin like he was slitting him open—Himuro felt it, the splitting of his skin, the new sharpness of the wind on flesh and gut and bone that should never be exposed to air—Atsushi drawing him in, drawing Himuro’s face to his warm, steady shoulder, humming as Himuro’s blood slipped warm down his legs to pool at his feet.

He choked and opened his eyes, his hand spasming against his still-whole stomach. “No,” he croaked, his voice as harsh as a crow’s. “No, not like this. I am not joining you— _you_ will join _me_.”

+

_“Stay with me,” he begged. “Please, Atsushi—”_

_Murasakibara frowned at him, his eyes not-quite focused on his face. “Don’t want to go,” he said. “Promised.”_

_Himuro blinked at him, startled out of his tears. “What do you mean?”_

_“Promised,” Murasakibara said again. He reached upward, and for a moment Himuro thought he might touch his face, but his hand caught in the chain around Himuro’s neck. He took the ring there between his fingers, turned it over and over. “Wanted to promise.”_

_Himuro took a shaky breath, realizing what he meant. “You still can,” he said. “You still have time.”_

_Murasakibara shook his head, his hand tracing down to his side, to the great wet patch spreading there. “Too late. Too late, Muro-chin.”_

_Himuro pulled him close, biting his lip so hard he drew blood. There were sirens in the distance but they were too faint—Atsushi’s breathing too faint. “No,” he said. “No.”_

_Murasakibara ran his hand—warm with his own blood— up the back of Himuro’s neck to clutch at his hair, clinging like a child. “Til death do us part,” he said, his voice ironic, ironic and resigned, and somehow that was worse than the rest of it combined—the fact that he wasn’t fighting, that like everything else in his life he was just letting this happen—that as much as his hands held on, his mind had already let Himuro go._

_“No,” Himuro snapped, to him and to the world that was taking him away. “Fuck that.”_

+

The darkness of the pit in front of him seemed to pulse with anger, little golden flashes dazzling him. He tried to blink them away but he saw the same swimming creatures in red relief on the insides of his eyelids. He took a breath, removing his hand from his skin and holding it palm-upward at his other side. He felt the moment the moonlight touched it, felt it cool and sharp as it traced the trail of blood down his wrist and up his shoulder. It pooled in the circle at the center of his chest and then sank inward, a sharp-edged weight like a very heavy, perfectly circular metal pole was being pushed slowly through his chest. The pain was incredible—starting out a faint ache, but slowly growing, growing, growing, stealing away Himuro’s ability to scream before he’d even formed the sound. He sagged, his mouth gaping, pulling harsh gasps into his lungs, his hands fisted on his knees. 

All he had to do was hang on. All he had to do was not break. He let his eyes flutter closed, focusing on Atsushi—not the Atsushi he’d known most recently, the one who had left him, not the boy he loved and resented in equal measure, but Atsushi as he’d first seen him, Atsushi magnificent, towering, power and grace hanging around him like a cloak. Atsushi moving across the court, beautiful in his unstoppable momentum, Atsushi with his muscles straining, Atsushi the first time they kissed—the first time Himuro had pulled back the curtain behind his eyes and seen the need and the endless capacity for love that it was hiding.

The spear of moonlight twisted inside him, pain rushing through his whole body. Himuro did not break. The wind rose, scattering his teeth and his chalk and his brass bowl. Himuro did not break. Voices poured from the pit in front of him, screaming, pleading, cajoling, begging him, a thousand vocal hands tugging at his clothes and his hair and the tips of his fingers. Himuro—glass heart in a steel casing—did not break.

Calm and breathing in the eye of the storm, he sorted through hands and voices until he found the one he knew. Reaching out with bloodstained fingers, he leaned over the edge of the pit, closed his fingers on nothing—the right nothing—and pulled.

The nothing crawled up his arm, welcoming him even as it drew him forward and downward. He let the spear of moonlight—thrust through him now, its point buried in the stone behind him—be an anchor. Let himself slide backwards, let its shaft move through him as he pulled, and pulled, and pulled, dragging the nothing-soul from the pit. The voices screamed through him—his back screamed in pain—as he arched, wracked and trembling, until the top of his head hit stone, his back bowed, both hands gripping nothing now, drawing it down against his chest. His whole body was shaking so hard his teeth clacked and snapped together, but through a throat full of knives he gasped the final word to end the spell.

The voices stopped so abruptly the silence was like a punch in the head. He collapsed backward, just a boy lying on his back in a pool of moonlight, his hands cupping something gently against his chest. Slowly—his hands were so stiff it was like pushing through stone—he opened his fingers.

A purple flower—its outer petals battered and bruised but its heart untouched—lay in the center of the circle of dried blood on his skin. Himuro ran a finger across its petals, their softness seeming almost alien to his touch. He spent a moment just staring at it, too exhausted for word or motion or even thought, and then—slowly—he shoved himself to his feet.

Keeping the flower against his chest with one hand and using the other to steady himself against the wall, against trees, against headstones, he stumbled and wandered through the graveyard. When at last he arrived at the grave—the grass over it just pushing up its first tentative shoots—he collapsed to his knees. Reaching out, he placed the flower against the soft earth, and then sat back and watched.

For a long time nothing happened. Wind—the normal October bluster—shifted through the trees. Somewhere an owl hooted, and another answered. Himuro wrapped his arms around him, hyperaware of his shirtlessness, of the blood smeared all over his chest and face, hyperaware of how this might look if someone were to—

Suddenly, with no ceremony at all, the earth beneath the flower moved.

**Author's Note:**

> Hm! I wonder if this explains anything else that's happening this month at all?


End file.
